Things are hopping! Here's a quick rundown...
The following servers have been added recently to the list of open Jabber servers: admin-networks.org, chat.mail2web.com, develog.com, freax.org, jabber.fr, jabber.linuxpro.nl, jabber.papla.pl, jabber.typhon.net, jabber.unixfreunde.net, jabber.xs4all.nl, jabberme.org, and may10.ca. Mind you, those are servers offering open registration of new users who have voluntarily asked to be added to the public list of server, not the much larger number of servers on the Jabber network. I'm currently working on a better way for XMPP servers to register with the network even if they are not accepting new users, and I plan to launch that service in the next few weeks. So over the next few months we will have a better idea of how many active servers there really are on the network -- it's in the tens of thousands, for sure.
Somewhow I neglected to mention that not one but two Jabber-related projects were honored in the Coolest Tk Screenshot Contest announced at the 11th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference back in October. Mats Bengtsson won a grand prize for The Coccinella, an XMPP-based chat and whiteboarding application. And Alexey Schchepin won an honorable mention for the Tkabber client. Since only four projects were honored, members of the Jabber community won 50% of the prizes. Congratulations to Mats and Alexey for their success!
Recently active projects include the jabberd2 server (with two releases of late); the mobber, IM+, and TipicME clients for various mobile devices, the neosmt client for Windows (with integrated voice, video, whiteboarding, and file transfer); the Lluna co-browsing client; and the sendxmpp tool for sending XMPP data from the command line or invoking from a script (great for system administrators!). The VCJB project is a robot that sends version control (CVS, Subversion, etc.) updates over Jabber. PyRSS is a new component under development to aggregate and delivery syndicated content over Jabber. Gradient is a special-purpose application that sends SVG-formatted images over XMPP. XCD is a C++ client daemon that is intended to allow any desktop application to tap into the goodness of Jabber and XMPP. Pilgrim is a "clean-room" implementation of RFCs 3920 and 3921. The Idavoll implementation of publish-subscribe continues to make good progress. James Bunton is doing great work with his Python-based gateways to AIM, ICQ, and MSN -- these three projects are quite active and all reports are that they are quite stable. Finally, special recognition is due to Jive Software, which has added to Smack (its open-source code library for developing Jabber clients and bots in Java) by open-sourcing Jive Messenger, its flagship XMPP server.
There are more Jabber-based services and applications than anyone keep track of. Here are some more projects that have come to my attention recently. First, it seems that Alcatel is building an interactive television application called AmigoTV using XMPP -- the application enables people watching the same television show to chat with each other in real time. As mentioned last time, a consortium of public libraries in the U.S. state of Georgia are working on an open-source integrated library system that uses XMPP as the communications layer to pass book information back and forth. The popular Eclipse integrated development environment (started by IBM and now maintained by the open-source community) is working to add XMPP support in the form of an Eclipse plugin. The Erlang-Projects community will contribute its XMPP-based J-EAI framework to the ObjectWeb consortium. Lots of folks are getting more interested in sending Atom and RSS data over XMPP to help address the fact that polling for updates doesn't scale. Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders project makes heavy use of chatrooms hosted at jabber.org to stay productive. And the list goes on...
Jabber technologies are becoming increasingly popular -- so much so that we need help in mirroring JabberStudio since so many people are downloading applications from that community source code repository. At least one and perhaps two websites for Jabber end-users are under development. Planning has begun for a conference of Jabber developers next summer. And 2005 promises to even busier.
Despite all this activity, some people seem to think that the Jabber community is dead. Far from it! Indeed, as we approach the sixth anniversary of Jeremie Miller's original release of the jabberd server, we can paraphrase Mark Twain: the reports of Jabber's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Jabber on!
--stpeter